What needs to be turned off to avoid international charges?

ddublu said:

Heading to Punta Cana on Friday....I had a Verizon intl plan put on my iPhone 5 but would really like to step away from work for this vacation....The resort will have wifi around the whole place so when I do have my device I will use that for most communication.....obviously i would turn cellular off but around messaging, is turning off "send as sms" the only other thing to turn off? MMS too, right?

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If you want nothing to come through on charges, calls, texts, etc, they make sure to put it in "Airplane Mode", if you want to get calls and texts, make sure to turn off "data roaming".

all of that is in settings

Airplane mode will certainly prevent you from getting charges, but the problem is it also disables Wifi and Bluetooth, which you don't want.

Turning off Cellular Data and Send as SMS, and not answering your phone if it rings, will take care of most of the problem. However you will still be able to receive text messages via SMS, which I think you still get charged for. If you don't get many text messages then this might be sufficient for you. I'm not aware of a setting to completely turn off the cellular connection, other than Airplane Mode which disables everything.

I have an AT&T phone so I can just pull the sim card, which completely takes care of the problem. I know Verizon phones for use only in the USA don't use sim cards, but I see that the Verizon iPhone supports GSM for international use. Does that mean it has a sim card? If so you could just pull it out to disable the cellular connection completely while out of the country. At least assuming Punta Cana is using GSM and not CDMA...

You can turn on airplane mode and still manually switch on wi-fi.

bilboa said:

Turning off Cellular Data and Send as SMS, and not answering your phone if it rings, will take care of most of the problem.

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Not quite. Due to the way GSM works you can end up being billed or double billed for calls that go to voicemail (once for the inbound call and once for the call going back to your voicemail center in the US). Airplane mode or shutting off the device is best practice if avoiding all international roaming charges are the top concern. As pointed out above, WiFi can be enabled in airplane mode.

At&t's site is very clear about this
http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/international/roaming/faq.jsp

but Verizon doesn't seem to be.

(For ATT phones only) I always simply lock the SIM when I am abroad...

AnorexicPig said:

You can turn on airplane mode and still manually switch on wi-fi.

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Cool! Thanks, I never realized that. Looks like you can turn on Bluetooth also. That solves the whole problem then I think. Just leave Airplane mode on, and turn on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

Just turn off dataroaming and you're fine.

If your phone is unlocked, an option could be to take along a sim cutter, buy a local sim and put it in your phone and have a local phone number. I generally have been using local SIMS in different countries for many years now.

Davejprince said:

Just turn off dataroaming and you're fine.

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Not quite, because you can still be charged for receiving text messages.

AnorexicPig said:

You can turn on airplane mode and still manually switch on wi-fi.

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This is the easiest and quickest way to avoid all international charges, but still get any messages wifi capable.

Airport mode on, then manualy turn wifi back on.

noisycats said:

This is the easiest and quickest way to avoid all international charges, but still get any messages wifi capable.

Airport mode on, then manualy turn wifi back on.

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With WiFi available, using that and iMessage (or any other data-based messaging service) along with Talkatone (or something else similar for calling, if needed) generally does the trick.